Saturday, March 1, 2008

Lars Nilsson .... from here to there to nowhere.

Here we go again. How does he do it.... or not do it?

" .....Even before he had presented his first women’s fashion collection for Gianfranco Ferre, its creative director Lars Nilsson has left the house. “Gianfranco Ferre would like to announce that it has ended its relationship with Signor Lars Nilsson,” read a statement released by the house on Friday evening. .... Somewhat ironically, the email containing Ferre’s statement read: “We are pleased to send you here attached the mentioned press release.” ...."

What had Glenda Bailey said when he got the job?

“It’s great to have Lars back! He has such a love of architecture. It’s very exciting for Ferré. Lars has such a core of simplicity and clean lines but he also matches it with femininity. He understands fabrication and technique.”

Come again? We are talking about the guy who has been thrown out of every job he's ever had. At Blass, that bastion of fashion avant-guard, he was more concerned with his pay check and throwing temper tantrums and threats of quitting on a weekly basis. It's a wonder anything got done. But then again, they do have an archive of every pattern ever drafted by the old man and his team.

Well, i guess your paycheck matters if you have to show up with Anna for lunch in bespoke suits. After all, she shoe-horned him into the job. Does a company have a choice? Either hire her coterie or never get covered. Why are they pushing talent with a resume that should say after every job

"reason for leaving: FIRED"

"....Tensions mounted in recent weeks at the Ferré studio in Milan, where Nilsson was said to be behind schedule in preparing the collection. "He got overwhelmed and realized it was too big a responsibility for him," said one industry insider."The position made him very insecure." As of last week, he was said to have only completed a handful of pieces. "This is a company that takes fashion very seriously because it's a big business," said an industry executive. "At the end of the day, Lars was not a right fit and it was too big a fish for him to fry."...

Well, Fashion Week Daily quoted the right fashion insider for once.

And good old Suzy?

"We keep having those false starts," said the International Herald Tribune's Suzy Menkes. " I don't know how you can expect to have the perfect collection in one season. I feel sad for [the state of] fashion."

State of fashion? The larger question is how is it that such a "great talent" like super-hyped Lars can't even get a first collection out with all those fabled Ferre resources at his command, when countless "small" design houses do it season after season without a fraction of these resources. It begs the question: "what's up wi' dat?"

All this whining and moaning for the unfair treatment of said wunderkind "designer", Lars, is misguided and pathetic considering the opportunities he has systematically squandered. (how many millions went down the drain so far betting on this lame horse).

The irony is: each successive job has been both grander and more short lived than the previous. Perhaps the house of Ferre saw the sketching on the wall and realized "this emperor's closet is bare."

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

fantastic assessment. It's time someone shined a light on these over paid and over praised designers that go from place to place making big news and big bucks only to leave and do the same thing again somewhere else. It must be the magazine -mafia that gets the same 5 repeat offenders these plum jobs, I have a feeling there's a huge supply of brass knuckles in Anna's tote bag.